It is high, but it depends on experience and who they work for. More common for people with 5-7yr experience is in the 90-110k range, but it's not abnormal to find skilled folks at places like SAS, Cisco, Citrix, Redhat, MS, Lenovo, BASF, IBM, NetApp, and many more earning above mean salaries.
Source: live in RDU, was an engineering director until last summer, hired lots of people here over the years and know a bunch more. What's disturbing is the number of companies only hiring contractors or contract-to-hire engineers around here.
Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina is what it usually means, there's a lot of programming and biomedical business in the area between the 3 cities because we have 3 colleges in the area to feed new talent in for a lot of different fields.
If you prefer working in financial services, you can also check all the banks in Charlotte. Also, MetLife & Fidelity are constantly hiring like mad in Cary/Morrisville.
That's very interesting. I'm in the area and thought it would skew lower, even for ~18 years experience like in the spreadsheet. It would be nice to know the company for that particular row.
Agreed... I was granted X options when I started over a 4 year vest... Those shares are worth a lot more now too... Is it my original price since that was the assumption when I was hired?
You're being downvoted because the idea of asking people to self-report their personal many-spirited gender identities on an oppressive, single-axis slider is outright offensive. You might as well literally be Hitler.
We clearly need a 5-dimensional gender selector in the form of a virtual tesseract.
I sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. Ever since I was a boy I dreamed of soaring over the oilfields dropping hot sticky loads on disgusting foreigners. People say to me that a person being a helicopter is Impossible and I’m fucking retarded but I don’t care, I’m beautiful. I’m having a plastic surgeon install rotary blades, 30 mm cannons and AMG-114 Hellfire missiles on my body. From now on I want you guys to call me “Apache” and respect my right to kill from above and kill needlessly. If you can’t accept me you’re a heliphobe and need to check your vehicle privilege. Thank you for being so understanding.
Well if you are gender fluid then select what you identify as at the moment of filling the spreadsheet.
Or better yet select what your employer sees you as, if you are a 6'3" male with a neckbeared your employer thinks you are a man regardless if you identify yourself as male, female, neither or a walrus.
So change it to "Sex" or "Human Biological Sex". One is a useful metric delineating two physiologically and psychologically different halves of human biology determined by your DNA. The other is a pretty useless personal opinion about "what do I feel like inside?". I'm happy for you feeling your new invented gender (bisexual-wolf-bear spirit??) to replace our old invented genders, but it doesn't say shit about your biology.
Sorry, I should have started with a trigger warning.
There are also entries from people who identify as space lizards and attack helicopters, so I wouldn't consider anything in that field to be of value to anyone.
Just look at the number of flagged posts in this thread - it's obvious Hacker News can't take the concept of gender seriously. Why should the data be taken seriously?
I'm one of the only women I know who posts here. I'm afraid it's not a particularly friendly community for women, and it does get old seeing the same stupid flamewars about gender and women in the industry and feminism et cetera ad infinitum.
The worst posts certainly get downvoted and flagged. The problem is the posts that sound reasonable but aren't. It gets tiring and somewhat depressing trying to educate people about the same things over and over again.
I certainly hope not. To me the entire value of Hacker News is being educated about things I don't understand, by people who know exactly what they're talking about.
That could be because lots of people just ignore these topics on a Web site. I'll argue in person, but it achieves nothing over the Web except to annoy me, so I pass over the comments or articles.
Not intending to talk down your comment, but some of the most annoying gender-topic discussions I see on HN are the ones of the variety "there is no gender problem in tech/on HN/online". And there's plenty of those, including flagging/deletion of threads that bring up a legitimate discussion or an under-discussed perspective of this.
Thanks for your kind words, I'm glad I'm not the only one that's seeing this problem. I did get lots of upvotes for a comment on the "post your typical HN headline" thread a year ago, to which I sarcastically replied "Why we have a gender problem in tech [flagged]". So at least a proportion of HN users care about this.
I'm not even a feminist; in fact I'm vehemently in favor of equal treatment and opportunities but against special treatment except maybe if it's a strictly temporary measure. But at the risk of using feminist rhetoric, it's almost as if there's an invisible wall that prevents these issues being seriously treated. It's incredibly annoying. Maybe it's a US thing, I see less of it at home in Scandinavia. Europe in general is either-or, I guess.
We have our share of gender discrimination problems (going in both directions), but this particular variety seems less prevalent. I really hope this gets better over time, or that there are good ways to avoid the problem. Must be annoying to deal with when you only want to do a good job and participate on equal terms in the community.
I agree that a sizable proportion of HN users care about this stuff. It seems to be the people who check the site less often. Usually the downvotes come right away, and the long tail of upvotes comes later.
And yes, it is incredibly annoying. I would very much prefer to be talking about dependencies and package (mis)management or whatever. If the gender equality issues would go away I would be quite glad to never mention them again.
My anecdata having worked in Seattle and Chicago now:
Chicago's 'tech scene' is mostly either trading or tech applied in an incremental way to an existing business model, eg Groupon. The trading firms do pay quite well, but you'll be in an extreme niche and likely have limited insight into how you could ever leave, given you've not been building products/programming so much as coding performance improvements. The few "hard tech" companies I've seen come from Chicago are either a generation old at this point (eg Motorola) or have gone under (eg TempoIQ).
The other fact of Chicago is, most of the tech talent here is here for reasons beyond having the best job ever. When I moved back, just about no one could believe that I didn't have a family/significant other/etc reason to move back beyond the job itself. When you have a market like that, employers have some buying power with the talent that does need to stay here. There's simply so few alternatives to the situation, given there's also little appetite for significantly striking out on your own, compared to the coast.
Edit: I'll also say the appetite for go big or go home company growth is limited here. Can't tell you the last time I saw a "shoot for the moon" idea originate in Chicago. There are pros/cons to that, admittedly.
And, if you are interested in a smaller Chicago company doing interesting things, feel free to check out Earshot (http://earshotinc.com/careers) - we are hiring. </plug>
Even if Earshot isn't right for you feel free to connect with me if you are interested in the Chicago startup scene.
This has been on my mind for awhile. My current theory is that Chicago companies don't need top talent and there are plenty of non-top talent engineers. simple supply and demand.
Easier to hire here, supposedly. Fewer tech firms by comparison to SF/NY -> less competition for applicants.
I'm in Chicago making ~95k and these threads the last couple days have been ever so mildly depressing, with people graduating same year as me and making $323k.
I just have a hard time believing that. It's a funny contradiction because I know perfectly well I'm not really much happier now at $95k than I was at $60k, or working in a park for minimum wage a decade ago, but at the same time there's so much I'd like to do that I don't because I'm trying to save money, and at $323k it would be pretty effortless to save massively and do whatever I wanted.
The things you want to do start to expand when you have more money, plus in the first place your budget for mundane shit blows out due to lifestyle inflation. If you socialise with other people in the same income bracket, it's going to happen.
Right, this will naturally happen for most people, but if you're mindful of this effect you can work to curb it if you choose.
There are people in the top 1% who "feel poor" - because they live in expensive homes, drive luxury cars, feel the need to send their kids to the most expensive private schools, and have friends who own yachts - and there are millionaires who basically live like they make $80,000. I would aim more toward the latter (although obviously going too far in that direction can be unhealthy too).
Chicago is so incredibly cheap compared to NYC or SF. You can actually afford to own something in the most desirable parts of Chicago and can still have the benefit of not having to own a car in many cases. I thought about relocating to Chicago (it's a great, underrated city) and was shocked how cheap the rent was in places like Lincoln Park. I could just buy a place. I can't say that about NYC or SF where rents are more than double. What you pay $3,300.00/month for in NYC or SF you can get for $1,500.00/month in Chicago.
Places I looked at also included parking. In a place like NYC or SF a parking spot can cost over $800.00/month. There's just so many wealthy people in NYC and SF and so much more demand for limited living space.
I don't know about downtown, since I'm a suburbanite, but I've found in the Chicago area, it's generally cheaper to buy than rent. My first place was a condo, because renting was pretty much throwing money away.
And if you can suffer the commute, in the suburbs, you get a condo AND a parking spot for $800 a month. o_o
I agree. When I was doing an apartment search I started to realize renting wasn't worth it in Chicago if you have the funds to buy. My goal was to find a 6 month lease so I could figure out where I wanted to buy. I'm a city guy so the 'burbs aren't for me. I've heard that condo's are being built rather rapidly in the city so the demand curve has stayed steady resulting in stable and affordable prices. I wish I could say the same about NYC. Even as more and more places are being built there are more and more people moving here keeping demand unbelievably high.
But alas, the move was not to be (for now anyways).
Have to agree. I grew up in Chicago and moved to New York about 4 years ago. My W2 income in NYC is about 3x higher than it was in Chicago, though I am better at my job now than I was then so it's not all a cost-of-living adjustment.
Anyway, I've begun the house search in New York City. I'm looking for a 1 bedroom apartment, in some place like Brooklyn Heights, Carrol Gardens, Gowanus, etc. Not Midtown Manhattan or Tribeca. Setting the budget to $700,000, literally everything available is a tiny shithole. I did find a small 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights that's nice. 3 million dollars.
I did the same search in Chicago. For half the money, you can get 1500 square feet, with nice modern finishings, 13 foot ceilings, etc. right downtown. If I were buying in Chicago, my conundrum would be "this is really too much space, my house is going to feel _empty_".
The NYC and SF housing situation is really quite insane. The best career move I can imagine making is keeping my current salary and literally moving anywhere else in the world, except maybe London. The rest of the world is dirt cheap compared to NYC and the bay area. It's so crazy.
Good luck on the search - NYC is its own animal when it comes to real estate. $700,000 isn't going find much except maybe a studio. I've seen 1 bedrooms in that range but they are generally undesirable units in an otherwise nice building. Plus you still have the maintenance fee's and taxes.
I'm not an expert but my opinion is the NYC housing market isn't a deal right now or even a fair value. I'm not saying it's a bubble, but it's certainly not cheap. If I stay here I'm just going to keep saving and see if I get lucky with a housing dip and my savings intact.
Plus, if you buy into a co-op (more common in Manhattan I believe) the purchase requirements are steep. Often 30% down, 2 years mortgage/maintenance/taxes in liquid cash available, among other things. High entry requirements but creates some stability.
I really think renting is cheaper than buying in NYC right now when you factor in all the costs. You get a nice tax write off with owning, to be sure, but it's a wash I've figured. I don't see how prices can keep getting higher and higher right now. But I thought that 4 years ago too in places in Brooklyn and I was wrong.
What's funny is my only other real option is to move to London since my wife is from there and would eventually like to move back I think. Their housing market is in fact a bubble and I simply wouldn't buy anywhere near there right now.
I agree it's not a fair value right now. Brooklyn is certainly in a bubble, or if not a bubble, a period of aggressive overpricing. I don't think prices are going to fall, causing one to lose money if they buy right now... but I also don't think that you're going to resell your $1M one-bedroom in Gowanus for $2M in 5 years. Objectively, that's a lot of money.
You're definitely competing with households that have two incomes, hence 3 million dollars being spent on one bedroom apartments. If you have a household income of $1M a year pre-tax, certainly a possibility for two programmers mid-career, then you have a lot of options.
Personally, I don't care about living in New York except that my job is here, so it may be nearing the time to move back to Chicago.
Note, I could be wrong. These could be the worst places you're talking about. But it seems like there are at least a few around 800k, and the housing market moves fast [so you'll see lots of options if you look for a couple months].
20% down: $160,000
24 months mortgage in the bank: $68,000
24 months maintenance/property tax in the bank: $36,000
For a total of $264,000 not including closing costs. I don't have $264,000 lying around at this precise moment.
$600,000 is my real budget. $700,000 is for searching and getting an idea of "what if I wait another year and save up some more money".
All in all I'm not that excited. My apartment that I rent for $2500/month is way better than any of those places that turn up. And by "way better", I mean "still an embarrassment compared to the house I grew up in when I was a kid, that cost less than the down payment for a studio in Brooklyn". I don't even have a microwave.
Not to mention even if you have every lined up you can still get rejected by the co-op board and they don't have to give a reason. They go through all your personal details and it's a bit odd living with a bunch of people who know everything about you but you're not able to learn anything about them.
20% down is usually the bottom. A lot of places want 25% or 30% down and there's also a chance you're going against someone with 100% cash and the board will pick them nearly every time.
Lastly, if you're using every dime you have so you get a mortgage well over 500k that may be a bad choice. The opportunity cost of tying that much cash up into a mortgage is a lot of risk (all your net worth in 1 investment) and you're unable to use that cash to make other investments and leverage them if need be.
I don't look at real-estate as an investment, but rather as a sunk cost. I need somewhere to live, I want to screw around with walls and plumbing fixtures when I feel like it, owning seems like the right option.
Of course you don't actually own your co-op, you just own shares in a company that actually owns your property.
But to nit; I believe a coop is only 10% down (condos are 20%. Either way it doesn't really change your math). And I'm still years from being able to buy a place in NYC, so sigh
You will never find a co-op that lets you be a member at 10%. 20% is the minimum I've seen and usually you're looking at 25% or 30%. And there's a chance someone with all cash will simply be a better fit for them.
Please find me a Co-Op in NYC that lets you in with 10%.
This is the reason I'm still in Chicago. I have wanted to move to SF since 2010, but it just doesn't make sense for my (now) wife and I financially. Recruiters who have called me with job offers in SF just don't have a big enough of a pay bump to make it worth it. It really sucks, because we would love to move to the bay area, we just can't get over the amazing setup we have in Chicago.
According to cost of living calculators, I would need ~250k in SF to be equal to my comp in Chicago, and my wife would need ~135k. My salary increase to be at parity is probably doable, but from other people's posts, it would require a pretty good job that included RSUs. I'm also not in a 100% development role, which I think I would need to do in order to get that kind of pay in SF, and it would probably be hard to break into (plus I just turned 30, I'm an old man now, hah).
My quality of life in my area is huge compared to the seemingly slave like conditions people face in SF. No thanks. If I wanted sun I would go to LA anyways.
Social status. Developers don't have high social status in Chicago, whereas in the Bay Area, they do.
I don't care what people say, pay is all just social status. Even relatively objective measures like, "I made the company XX" are only possible in the scope of narrow consulting engagements, and such estimates are hazy.
Trying to quantify the long-term economic value of an employee is even worse.
This. The value of social status could be easily tested by exchanging a high salary for significant ownership of the company. My bet is that people would be just as happy.
Someone here recently ranted a bit against the fact that bright minds work in finance on useless work instead of greater things. The one answer from such a worker was about the huge difference between management compensation and worker compensation in those other, "more important" fields. Not the absolute salary.
To add another reason beyond just cost of living: Chicago has a bunch of really high quality engineering schools nearby that produce an absolute ton of engineers. You have people from UIUC, Northwestern, Purdue, IUB, UWMadison, and Michigan all moving to chicago after graduation. It creates a sort of glut in the labor supply.
A lot of them cannot or just don't want to move far away for more pay. A lot of the grads are from chicago or smaller midwestern cities.
Eh, I think in cases of ambiguity you might be better off just sticking the state into the name of the city. Like "USA - New York City" vs "USA - Springfield (IL)".
Yes that works too - at least if you have a preset list of locations it's perfect.
Country: USA
City: Springfield (IL)
If you don't have a db of cities to choose from you likely end up with cleaner data by sticking state to country since you could make a db for that with just some 100-200 entries.
Country/State: US/Illinois, City: Springfield
The original point is still there though, having a single location field breaks down quickly.
Locations shouldn't be limited to numbers. Also, now that the salary field is limited to numbers, it should be clear which currency everything should be converted to, since people can't put their currencies in the column anymore.
I think we could come up with a better way to standarize equity. Maybe have one column for per year value, and another with the details to capture weird vesting schedules like Amazon.
regardless of whether you're looking, and an anonymized means of contact. It literally can't hurt. I don't think it even gives off any signal.
I mean if you saw "$130K/undisclosed options/Bay Area/ Jump ship literally tomorrow: $180K + $15k signing bonus" it's next to no information. The only thing that can happen is you get a $180K offer in the mail, so that you can start somewhere else tomorrow. Nor does it price you out of any market, because presumably you would work for between $130K and $180K - maybe just not starting tomorrow, it would just take a LITTLE more interviewing. Nor does it show any level of dissatisfaction whatsoever to your current employer, should they put two and two together based on your skills or job title or anything else.
The data is going to get really stale. What my jump ship tomorrow number is today will probably be vastly different in a year, two years, etc. Not to mention how does it help someone who just wants to see how their salary compares to others?
But as for the staleness issue you raise - that could be quite easy, the automated contact could be "tdicola, you have received a message about your jump-ship number", it can list whatever the person wanted to send you, and if it's stale data you could update it on the spot or remove yourself from that kind of search.
I would think most people "have their jump-ship-tomorrow price", and updating it whenever you receive an offer that's outdated (and based on old info) means it would stay more or less current.
Haha, your profile here is intriguing, you can shoot me an email introducing yourself and I'll certainly reply, if nothing else to congratulate you on getting to work on such cool applications.
Personally, "jump ship tomorrow salary requirement" is one of many items used to decide whether to actually jump ship or not.
At the end of the day, these type of data is only one aspect to consider when deciding what to do next, or even to contemplate the next step. Having these data available adds another input into the mix.
for sure! It's not like if our example gets an email saying someone would like to hire them for $180K, then they'll drive over for an interview and hand in their notice the same day.
But do you think this is information that (as I think) should be asked here? I'm thinking it can only help workers.
all right (just to be clear I have nothing to do with the spreadsheet.)
I was actually thinking that this could be a sort-of 'standing offer' from people as well. I mean hiring would certainly be a lot easier if everyone on linkedin had their price that you could probably immediately get them for!
This is just particularly true in the tech industry, which is prone to delirious investor-fueled bubbles on the one hand, but in which, on the other hand, employees really can generate a few million dollars worth of value over a weekend. (For example, by refining a checkout recommendation for related items, that one refinement could objectively result in an extra $million in sales through that exact mechanism.)
So I think the ability to actually reach workers at their jump-ship price (as opposed to just anonymously asking them for it, without any possibility for follow-up) could be a net benefit to employees. Good tech workers are extremely scarce.
I'm still in college, so I wouldn't have any idea. But my guess is they don't want to move to a higher COL and are settled or they just don't know how much they are worth on the open market.
One thing that I have noticed at my own school is that many of my peers undersell themselves and don't even apply to the highest paying companies despite being very qualified.
It's a big country, the salaries are distorted by SF/SV, NYC and select other large employers.
Where I live in a rural small town, I make top 5% tech salary (~80k$ canadian pesos). The same salary in Montreal is probably 25-30 percentile of tech salary? In Vancouver it probably would be 45th percentile of tech salaries. That said a the price of a Vancouver condo buys a Montreal Duplex and buys a whole New Brunswick suburban sub-division... Or a mansion with a few acres on the sea front and 5 bedrooms / 7 baths...
I was hired for $65k or so after a 6-month job search left me financially drained. There was the promise that typical raises could go into the 10% or more per year region, with a possible promotion to a Senior Software Engineer position, but after a sister company had a poor year of growth and a lawsuit hit my company this past year, I'm at-or-under $70k. It's awful, especially when given that I work 44-48 hours per week and given that my domain knowledge is incredibly broad and I know my specialities inside-and-out, and have a Master's. I was really expecting an appropriate pay raise recently because my work helped my company sign a new client who's something like 100x their size, their "chump change" is, like, double everything the startup makes.
Part of the reason that I'm staying is because I'm in a tremendous amount of debt and therefore I've become extremely paranoid and risk-averse. Part of the reason is that said debt has me working a second job and I am in a largely-dysfunctional relationship besides, so I have very little energy outside of this job. Part of the reason is that I have gained 80 pounds and no longer fit into any nice clothes for a job interview, with very little chance of me getting anything nice any time soon.
Man, that paragraph makes me sound like such a downer. I promise that I'm really happy and easygoing most of the time! That's just the more-sober reality of why I find it a huge struggle to jump onto some new thing.
I guess a great question is... are they happy with it? I like my current employer, they're the kind of company I want to work for. I actually stated the salary I wanted upfront, and they gave it to me. It isn't particularly high, but it covers my needs and then some. It was a bit more than my salary at my last job, which was fine with me.
I'm wondering the opposite what does one even do with more than $70K?
I'm doing an apprenticeship starting when I was 17 year old and I only earn $11K (I don't pay income tax because it's so low) and yet I managed to save up 8k because I live with my parents right now and except maybe buying a car I don't even know what to spend it on.
For context rent is here at about $400/month for a single bedroom apartment. Another $300/month is enough to cover food and utilities for at least two people.
Unless you want to retire in san francisco or some big city there is no real advantage to buying a home there. So are you buying a new tesla every two years? Are you buying a macbook/iphone/high-end gaming pc every month? I honestly have no clue.
EDIT: Maybe I should also mention that the company will pay me at least $30k/y after the apprenticeship.
Here's some general idea about how people spend their money, not that you couldn't figure this out on your own.
Houses: 100k-1mm
Cars: 15-80k (each)
Vacations/Travel: 2-10k/year
Expensive Clothing: $3-5k/year
Jewelry: $0-5k/year
Hobbies: $1-20k/year
Entertainment/Dining/Drinks: $1-20k/year
Retirement & Other Investments: $0 - 50k/year
Repeat some of that stuff for their children, add college expenses, maybe private school.
Those are just some examples that I largely based off of my sister. She is constantly expanding/improving her home (bathroom remodel and new pool in the past 18 months), she loves big expensive jewelry, she has designer purses and clothing, they have 4 cars which all have TVs and other fancy options in them, they have a class A RV, her husband builds cars & races at the track, they have young boys and everyone has a dirtbike, boys have modern toys/video games/etc.
You might think "wow, that's ridiculous," but really they're just spending to their level of income. It's pretty common.
You, on the other hand, seem to be more like me. Of my salary I'm required to spend 8.2% on my mortgage, so I don't default. I've started a homestead that I've been buying a lot of tools and equipment for. My utilities come out to another ~1.5% of my salary. Everything else is savings, and/or thrown on to the mortgage. I'm going to pay my mortgage off fully in ~18-24 months (total time). I have no other debts and after that I can save 100% of my salary. I'd like to maybe build a new home on this homestead someday, but I'm not going to go into debt to build it. In the meantime, the salary affords me the luxury of no financial concerns and the ability to help others when they need it.
If I had no debts or ambitions to own property, and I didn't mind living in a small single bedroom apartment like your example, I would spend the $700/month on my living expenses and save the rest. I'd probably dip into savings to visit another country each year. I'd retire early.
In the end, that's your real answer. Savings & retirement funds. You just haven't thought that far ahead because you're very young.
They added a concerned face on the end, which implies there is something about which to be concerned. Objectively, that is an opinion, not just an observation. Subjectively, I believe it's nothing to be concerned about at all, considering the circumstances of the creation of the sheet and where it's been posted.
I think the results spreadsheet and how disorganized the results are is the answer to the question "why not". Most people just omitted the employer name, which I believe is the most significant factor to one’s salary.
What I'd like to see is a salary aggregator that works as a native app only:
1) It should use the Facebook model of release where only "elite" institutions are allowed on at first and only one at a time.
2) It should use geolocation as a way to verify the user works there (other ways are easier to game or too burdensome). Yes, this does leave out remote workers. See #1.
Sure, but 1. even a small amount of friction will cut off the vast majority from doing it, especially when 2. there's no payoff to lying about your location in a salary transparency app
Funny you bring up Facebook, because what I you really need to solve this type of problem is something like Facesmash. (sidenote: I don't know if that was actually a real thing or just something in The Social Network.)
You want /r/roastme for coworkers-- but private. Somewhere that you can rank former coworkers and they can rank you-- But the biggest selling point needs to be that this dossier is only ever available to you. NEVER to potential employers, coworkers, etc.
There are some interesting problems-- like delaying/masking the changing in your ELO such that it can't be tied to people you know have ranked you, otherwise you'll get an obvious bias because people don't want to risk a burnt bridge.
But I think if people are honest about their salaries on such a site, you can give them a reasonable idea of if they're being underpaid.
To what degree is one expected to derive meaningful results? You can compare for a close match, but drawing conclusions in aggregate is sure to be inaccurate. There's simply too much bias in this type of sampling.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadSource: live in RDU, was an engineering director until last summer, hired lots of people here over the years and know a bunch more. What's disturbing is the number of companies only hiring contractors or contract-to-hire engineers around here.
Others will also refer to it as RTP, but that's really a specific area in RDU.
(PS: When in doubt check airport codes.)
So, no different than anywhere else.
Uh, I mean, that was a total fluke, there are no jobs here, go on about your business... ;)
I was interviewing when I found the $99K job and another company said they'd pay $80K, but want to me work minimum 60 hours.
For example, you could have (City, State) for the location, and (numbers only) for numeric input fields.
We clearly need a 5-dimensional gender selector in the form of a virtual tesseract.
Or better yet select what your employer sees you as, if you are a 6'3" male with a neckbeared your employer thinks you are a man regardless if you identify yourself as male, female, neither or a walrus.
Sorry, I should have started with a trigger warning.
I don't think these are related.
Anti-female, sexist, or insensitive-about-female-issue posts regularly get downvoted and flagged, from what I've seen.
I'm not even a feminist; in fact I'm vehemently in favor of equal treatment and opportunities but against special treatment except maybe if it's a strictly temporary measure. But at the risk of using feminist rhetoric, it's almost as if there's an invisible wall that prevents these issues being seriously treated. It's incredibly annoying. Maybe it's a US thing, I see less of it at home in Scandinavia. Europe in general is either-or, I guess.
We have our share of gender discrimination problems (going in both directions), but this particular variety seems less prevalent. I really hope this gets better over time, or that there are good ways to avoid the problem. Must be annoying to deal with when you only want to do a good job and participate on equal terms in the community.
And yes, it is incredibly annoying. I would very much prefer to be talking about dependencies and package (mis)management or whatever. If the gender equality issues would go away I would be quite glad to never mention them again.
It baffled me when I lived there, and it still baffles me when I don't.
Chicago's 'tech scene' is mostly either trading or tech applied in an incremental way to an existing business model, eg Groupon. The trading firms do pay quite well, but you'll be in an extreme niche and likely have limited insight into how you could ever leave, given you've not been building products/programming so much as coding performance improvements. The few "hard tech" companies I've seen come from Chicago are either a generation old at this point (eg Motorola) or have gone under (eg TempoIQ).
The other fact of Chicago is, most of the tech talent here is here for reasons beyond having the best job ever. When I moved back, just about no one could believe that I didn't have a family/significant other/etc reason to move back beyond the job itself. When you have a market like that, employers have some buying power with the talent that does need to stay here. There's simply so few alternatives to the situation, given there's also little appetite for significantly striking out on your own, compared to the coast.
Edit: I'll also say the appetite for go big or go home company growth is limited here. Can't tell you the last time I saw a "shoot for the moon" idea originate in Chicago. There are pros/cons to that, admittedly.
"Oh, you already have offers on the table in NYC and Boston, with no family here? Yeah, I understand why you wouldn't be interested in Chicago"
That being said, I think there are plenty of interesting tech companies here if you dig a bit. For example, CleverSafe (https://www.cleversafe.com/), Signal (http://www.signal.co/), and BrainTree (https://www.braintreepayments.com/) are larger ones with real engineering challenges.
And, if you are interested in a smaller Chicago company doing interesting things, feel free to check out Earshot (http://earshotinc.com/careers) - we are hiring. </plug>
Even if Earshot isn't right for you feel free to connect with me if you are interested in the Chicago startup scene.
I'm in Chicago making ~95k and these threads the last couple days have been ever so mildly depressing, with people graduating same year as me and making $323k.
[1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/money-improves-qual...
There are people in the top 1% who "feel poor" - because they live in expensive homes, drive luxury cars, feel the need to send their kids to the most expensive private schools, and have friends who own yachts - and there are millionaires who basically live like they make $80,000. I would aim more toward the latter (although obviously going too far in that direction can be unhealthy too).
Places I looked at also included parking. In a place like NYC or SF a parking spot can cost over $800.00/month. There's just so many wealthy people in NYC and SF and so much more demand for limited living space.
Cost of living will influence salaries a lot.
And if you can suffer the commute, in the suburbs, you get a condo AND a parking spot for $800 a month. o_o
But alas, the move was not to be (for now anyways).
Anyway, I've begun the house search in New York City. I'm looking for a 1 bedroom apartment, in some place like Brooklyn Heights, Carrol Gardens, Gowanus, etc. Not Midtown Manhattan or Tribeca. Setting the budget to $700,000, literally everything available is a tiny shithole. I did find a small 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights that's nice. 3 million dollars.
I did the same search in Chicago. For half the money, you can get 1500 square feet, with nice modern finishings, 13 foot ceilings, etc. right downtown. If I were buying in Chicago, my conundrum would be "this is really too much space, my house is going to feel _empty_".
The NYC and SF housing situation is really quite insane. The best career move I can imagine making is keeping my current salary and literally moving anywhere else in the world, except maybe London. The rest of the world is dirt cheap compared to NYC and the bay area. It's so crazy.
I'm not an expert but my opinion is the NYC housing market isn't a deal right now or even a fair value. I'm not saying it's a bubble, but it's certainly not cheap. If I stay here I'm just going to keep saving and see if I get lucky with a housing dip and my savings intact.
Plus, if you buy into a co-op (more common in Manhattan I believe) the purchase requirements are steep. Often 30% down, 2 years mortgage/maintenance/taxes in liquid cash available, among other things. High entry requirements but creates some stability.
I really think renting is cheaper than buying in NYC right now when you factor in all the costs. You get a nice tax write off with owning, to be sure, but it's a wash I've figured. I don't see how prices can keep getting higher and higher right now. But I thought that 4 years ago too in places in Brooklyn and I was wrong.
What's funny is my only other real option is to move to London since my wife is from there and would eventually like to move back I think. Their housing market is in fact a bubble and I simply wouldn't buy anywhere near there right now.
You're definitely competing with households that have two incomes, hence 3 million dollars being spent on one bedroom apartments. If you have a household income of $1M a year pre-tax, certainly a possibility for two programmers mid-career, then you have a lot of options.
Personally, I don't care about living in New York except that my job is here, so it may be nearing the time to move back to Chicago.
http://streeteasy.com/for-sale/nyc/type:D1,P1%7Cprice:700000...
Note, I could be wrong. These could be the worst places you're talking about. But it seems like there are at least a few around 800k, and the housing market moves fast [so you'll see lots of options if you look for a couple months].
20% down: $160,000 24 months mortgage in the bank: $68,000 24 months maintenance/property tax in the bank: $36,000
For a total of $264,000 not including closing costs. I don't have $264,000 lying around at this precise moment.
$600,000 is my real budget. $700,000 is for searching and getting an idea of "what if I wait another year and save up some more money".
All in all I'm not that excited. My apartment that I rent for $2500/month is way better than any of those places that turn up. And by "way better", I mean "still an embarrassment compared to the house I grew up in when I was a kid, that cost less than the down payment for a studio in Brooklyn". I don't even have a microwave.
20% down is usually the bottom. A lot of places want 25% or 30% down and there's also a chance you're going against someone with 100% cash and the board will pick them nearly every time.
Lastly, if you're using every dime you have so you get a mortgage well over 500k that may be a bad choice. The opportunity cost of tying that much cash up into a mortgage is a lot of risk (all your net worth in 1 investment) and you're unable to use that cash to make other investments and leverage them if need be.
I don't look at real-estate as an investment, but rather as a sunk cost. I need somewhere to live, I want to screw around with walls and plumbing fixtures when I feel like it, owning seems like the right option.
Of course you don't actually own your co-op, you just own shares in a company that actually owns your property.
Housing sucks.
But to nit; I believe a coop is only 10% down (condos are 20%. Either way it doesn't really change your math). And I'm still years from being able to buy a place in NYC, so sigh
Please find me a Co-Op in NYC that lets you in with 10%.
According to cost of living calculators, I would need ~250k in SF to be equal to my comp in Chicago, and my wife would need ~135k. My salary increase to be at parity is probably doable, but from other people's posts, it would require a pretty good job that included RSUs. I'm also not in a 100% development role, which I think I would need to do in order to get that kind of pay in SF, and it would probably be hard to break into (plus I just turned 30, I'm an old man now, hah).
I don't care what people say, pay is all just social status. Even relatively objective measures like, "I made the company XX" are only possible in the scope of narrow consulting engagements, and such estimates are hazy.
Trying to quantify the long-term economic value of an employee is even worse.
Someone here recently ranted a bit against the fact that bright minds work in finance on useless work instead of greater things. The one answer from such a worker was about the huge difference between management compensation and worker compensation in those other, "more important" fields. Not the absolute salary.
A lot of them cannot or just don't want to move far away for more pay. A lot of the grads are from chicago or smaller midwestern cities.
If you don't have a db of cities to choose from you likely end up with cleaner data by sticking state to country since you could make a db for that with just some 100-200 entries.
Country/State: US/Illinois, City: Springfield
The original point is still there though, having a single location field breaks down quickly.
Locations shouldn't be limited to numbers. Also, now that the salary field is limited to numbers, it should be clear which currency everything should be converted to, since people can't put their currencies in the column anymore.
* currency,
* country,
* industry,
* permanent or contractor
* residential status,
* remote or onsite,
But I agree, if the data can be trusted, this is all you need.
- "jump ship literally tomorrow salary requirement" (base, equity, signing bonus)
regardless of whether you're looking, and an anonymized means of contact. It literally can't hurt. I don't think it even gives off any signal.
I mean if you saw "$130K/undisclosed options/Bay Area/ Jump ship literally tomorrow: $180K + $15k signing bonus" it's next to no information. The only thing that can happen is you get a $180K offer in the mail, so that you can start somewhere else tomorrow. Nor does it price you out of any market, because presumably you would work for between $130K and $180K - maybe just not starting tomorrow, it would just take a LITTLE more interviewing. Nor does it show any level of dissatisfaction whatsoever to your current employer, should they put two and two together based on your skills or job title or anything else.
thoughts?
But as for the staleness issue you raise - that could be quite easy, the automated contact could be "tdicola, you have received a message about your jump-ship number", it can list whatever the person wanted to send you, and if it's stale data you could update it on the spot or remove yourself from that kind of search.
I would think most people "have their jump-ship-tomorrow price", and updating it whenever you receive an offer that's outdated (and based on old info) means it would stay more or less current.
At the end of the day, these type of data is only one aspect to consider when deciding what to do next, or even to contemplate the next step. Having these data available adds another input into the mix.
But do you think this is information that (as I think) should be asked here? I'm thinking it can only help workers.
I was actually thinking that this could be a sort-of 'standing offer' from people as well. I mean hiring would certainly be a lot easier if everyone on linkedin had their price that you could probably immediately get them for!
This is just particularly true in the tech industry, which is prone to delirious investor-fueled bubbles on the one hand, but in which, on the other hand, employees really can generate a few million dollars worth of value over a weekend. (For example, by refining a checkout recommendation for related items, that one refinement could objectively result in an extra $million in sales through that exact mechanism.)
So I think the ability to actually reach workers at their jump-ship price (as opposed to just anonymously asking them for it, without any possibility for follow-up) could be a net benefit to employees. Good tech workers are extremely scarce.
Best offers I have seen out of college is $130K total comp from random people on the internet, haven't seen anything better yet.
One thing that I have noticed at my own school is that many of my peers undersell themselves and don't even apply to the highest paying companies despite being very qualified.
Where I live in a rural small town, I make top 5% tech salary (~80k$ canadian pesos). The same salary in Montreal is probably 25-30 percentile of tech salary? In Vancouver it probably would be 45th percentile of tech salaries. That said a the price of a Vancouver condo buys a Montreal Duplex and buys a whole New Brunswick suburban sub-division... Or a mansion with a few acres on the sea front and 5 bedrooms / 7 baths...
Part of the reason that I'm staying is because I'm in a tremendous amount of debt and therefore I've become extremely paranoid and risk-averse. Part of the reason is that said debt has me working a second job and I am in a largely-dysfunctional relationship besides, so I have very little energy outside of this job. Part of the reason is that I have gained 80 pounds and no longer fit into any nice clothes for a job interview, with very little chance of me getting anything nice any time soon.
Man, that paragraph makes me sound like such a downer. I promise that I'm really happy and easygoing most of the time! That's just the more-sober reality of why I find it a huge struggle to jump onto some new thing.
I have a Toyota. I don't need a Tesla.
I am a (relatively) happy person.
What more could I want?
I'm doing an apprenticeship starting when I was 17 year old and I only earn $11K (I don't pay income tax because it's so low) and yet I managed to save up 8k because I live with my parents right now and except maybe buying a car I don't even know what to spend it on.
For context rent is here at about $400/month for a single bedroom apartment. Another $300/month is enough to cover food and utilities for at least two people.
Unless you want to retire in san francisco or some big city there is no real advantage to buying a home there. So are you buying a new tesla every two years? Are you buying a macbook/iphone/high-end gaming pc every month? I honestly have no clue.
EDIT: Maybe I should also mention that the company will pay me at least $30k/y after the apprenticeship.
Houses: 100k-1mm
Cars: 15-80k (each)
Vacations/Travel: 2-10k/year
Expensive Clothing: $3-5k/year
Jewelry: $0-5k/year
Hobbies: $1-20k/year
Entertainment/Dining/Drinks: $1-20k/year
Retirement & Other Investments: $0 - 50k/year
Repeat some of that stuff for their children, add college expenses, maybe private school.
Those are just some examples that I largely based off of my sister. She is constantly expanding/improving her home (bathroom remodel and new pool in the past 18 months), she loves big expensive jewelry, she has designer purses and clothing, they have 4 cars which all have TVs and other fancy options in them, they have a class A RV, her husband builds cars & races at the track, they have young boys and everyone has a dirtbike, boys have modern toys/video games/etc.
You might think "wow, that's ridiculous," but really they're just spending to their level of income. It's pretty common.
You, on the other hand, seem to be more like me. Of my salary I'm required to spend 8.2% on my mortgage, so I don't default. I've started a homestead that I've been buying a lot of tools and equipment for. My utilities come out to another ~1.5% of my salary. Everything else is savings, and/or thrown on to the mortgage. I'm going to pay my mortgage off fully in ~18-24 months (total time). I have no other debts and after that I can save 100% of my salary. I'd like to maybe build a new home on this homestead someday, but I'm not going to go into debt to build it. In the meantime, the salary affords me the luxury of no financial concerns and the ability to help others when they need it.
If I had no debts or ambitions to own property, and I didn't mind living in a small single bedroom apartment like your example, I would spend the $700/month on my living expenses and save the rest. I'd probably dip into savings to visit another country each year. I'd retire early.
In the end, that's your real answer. Savings & retirement funds. You just haven't thought that far ahead because you're very young.
I could have told you that HN readership skews male. Throwing the "observation" out there feels like an invitation to argue.
Apparently meta-observations aren't taken well either :)
They added a concerned face on the end, which implies there is something about which to be concerned. Objectively, that is an opinion, not just an observation. Subjectively, I believe it's nothing to be concerned about at all, considering the circumstances of the creation of the sheet and where it's been posted.
1) It should use the Facebook model of release where only "elite" institutions are allowed on at first and only one at a time.
2) It should use geolocation as a way to verify the user works there (other ways are easier to game or too burdensome). Yes, this does leave out remote workers. See #1.
You want /r/roastme for coworkers-- but private. Somewhere that you can rank former coworkers and they can rank you-- But the biggest selling point needs to be that this dossier is only ever available to you. NEVER to potential employers, coworkers, etc.
There are some interesting problems-- like delaying/masking the changing in your ELO such that it can't be tied to people you know have ranked you, otherwise you'll get an obvious bias because people don't want to risk a burnt bridge.
But I think if people are honest about their salaries on such a site, you can give them a reasonable idea of if they're being underpaid.